slug: BIG-GREEN30 Solar arrays cover the roofs on most of the buildings at Google Inc.'s headquarters in California. In addition to pledging to go Òcarbon neutral,Ó Google launched a massive program to reduce energy consumption in its giant data centers and announced it was investing hundreds of millions of dollars in research to figure out how to make renewable fuels as cheap as environmentally unfriendly coal.

SPECIAL TO THE DENVER POST Matthew Staver/Spacial to the Post 9/21/04 LAMAR COLORADO John Stulp, a farmer and county commissioner, looks up at one of the 1.5 megawatt wind turbines in the wind farm just south of Lamar Colorado. SPECIAL TO THE DENVER POST

Colorado has the potential to be a huge exporter of renewable energy, according to a new resource report compiled by Colorado energy officials.

But the clean-energy potential and its economic benefits carry a major caveat: whether billions of dollars can be raised to build the power facilities and the transmission lines needed to transport the energy.

The report from the Governor’s Energy Office calculates that Colorado has vast resources of wind and sun — enough, theoretically, to generate more than 10 times the power that the state uses on its highest-demand days.

“Renewable energy is a long-term economic opportunity for this state that hasn’t previously been entertained,” said Tom Plant, director of the Governor’s Energy Office.

If surplus clean energy can be developed, he said, it could be sold to other power-hungry states, particularly California, where regulators require that imported electricity be generated from low-carbon sources such as renewables.

The new report estimates that 10 high-energy locations in eastern and southern Colorado have enough wind and sun to generate 122,000 megawatts of power at peak capacity. Colorado’s total power consumption from all sources — renewables, coal and natural gas — is about 11,000 megawatts on peak summer demand days.

However, getting the full amount of renewable power would require more than 50,000 new wind turbines and dozens of square miles of solar collectors. State officials haven’t calculated the potential cost, but it would be many billions of dollars.

In addition, new high-voltage transmission lines in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico — which would be needed to export the new renewable power — are estimated to cost at least $5 billion.

Plant acknowledged that the major energy potential identified in the report is unlikely to be totally developed — at least for several decades — because of financing, transmission and land-use constraints.

But even if energy companies build only a fraction of the renewable resources available — which also include hydropower, geothermal energy and biofuels — the development will be a powerful economic tool for the state, said Don Elliman, executive director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development.

He said state officials are conducting a major campaign to attract companies that develop solar and wind farms as well as other firms that manufacture the turbines and panels used to collect the energy.

“It’s easier to get these companies when they know that we have the renewable resources and that we’re developing them,” Elliman said.

A recent report by the Colorado Energy Forum, a nonprofit research group funded by utilities, cautioned that renewable energy can play only a relatively small role in delivering power to Coloradans.

The report forecast that the state needs an additional 3,700 to 4,500 megawatts of power over the next 18 years but that renewables will provide just 330 to 1,122 megawatts of the needed electricity.

250 people -- all homeless and high-frequency users of jail, detox and emergency departments at taxpayer expense -- have been tracked down by Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and Mental Health Center of Denver outreach workers and given apartments through Denver's social-impact bond program.